Facebook reaches (almost) 600 million users in 210 countries

A few years ago, when the interest in Facebook was at it’s peak (at least as far as the online media goes), I used to keep a fairly regular eye on the Facebook active user numbers. These numbers are fairly publicly available, provided as they are by Facebook’s own advertising tool.

For those not familiar with the system, Facebook defines an ‘Active User’ as one who has logged in to their profile in the past 30 days – so a fairly good indicator of REAL (i.e. not dormant) accounts out there.

I’ve not been quite as hot on it lately, but I still like to dip-in occassionally to see how the ‘book is fairing. With last week’s news that Facebook had broken the 600 million barrier, I thought it was time to update the numbers – see below for the full table (including stats from the end of 2009, where available). If you can’t be bothered to trawl through the list, here’s my highlights:

Facebook have clearly decided to make their targeting more accurate, adding what appears to be every single country in the world to the list you can choose from

Despite the 600 million announcement, the current number (as of this morning) is just shy of this, at 595,900,614 – though seasonal variation can probably account for this blip

The UK, Canada, Norway, Denmark and Iceland all appear to have hit the ‘Facebook ceiling’, with year-on-year growth slowing dramatically

Conversely, Facebook’s spread continues at pace in many newer territories – South Korea has grown’s its usage more than 8-fold, for instance

Despite what you’d think, the Vatican City ISN’T Facebook’s smallest territory – that prize goes to Nauru, and island nation with a population of just 14,000

For those of you that like to dig around with the numbers, here’s the full table…